Understanding narrative relations in teacher education

The use of stories in teacher education is ubiquitous; yet, the question regarding how stories help teachers make sense of their professional lives is more complex than it first appears. The authors draw from Adriana Cavarero's understanding of narrative relations as the political site where one's unique singularity is revealed in the desire to have one's story told. They compare her insights to Judith Butler's resignification of injurious speech, examining both positions as they apply to a beginning teacher's efforts to become the professional she admires. It is suggested to teacher educators that they use stories from practice to foreground the tension between a teacher's life and her life-story. By understanding the irresolvable tension of desire to have one's story told, a teacher has a better chance of recognising her own vulnerability and that of her students, and of teaching at the starting place of ethics.     

Inclusive provision options for pupils on the autistic spectrum

In the last decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of pupils with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) attending mainstream schools. However, particular concerns have been expressed about their inclusion, focused on an increased risk of peer rejection and lack of staff knowledge about appropriate teaching approaches. Parental views of inclusive placements are consistently more positive where there is an ASD resource base in the school. This study was designed to investigate characteristics of the provision available to pupils with ASD in mainstream schools with and without a specialist ASD resource base. Information was gathered from semi‐structured interviews with staff in 26 schools about levels of inclusion and support, about the strategies used to support pupils with ASD, both at an individual and whole school level, and about changes considered desirable. Interviewees were also asked to describe how they would respond to scenarios depicting situations that are commonly experienced in working with pupils who have ASD. Findings confirmed that the features of mainstream placements identified as important by parents of children with ASD were more likely to be found in schools with ASD resource bases. However, it was found that comparable provision could be made across settings given appropriate staff training. Scope for further development across settings was also identified, particularly in the use of evidence‐based peer‐mediated strategies.     

Exploring transition to postgraduate study: Shifting identities in interaction with communities,practice and participation

There has been relatively little research to date that has explored the transition to postgraduate study. This paper reports findings from a project (funded by the UK's Higher Education Academy) that sought to address this gap. The research project was ethnographic and explored university practice and student participation in five UK universities. A significant emergent feature of the research was that a multiplicity of identities construct student experience and contribute to student transition. This finding provides support for learning theory that argues for inextricable links between learning and wider social identities. Moreover, the process of negotiating an academic identity in light of wider experience and university practices emerged as a key factor in understanding transition together with the imperative for independent study, which was a particularly powerful practice that necessitated complex identity negotiations in order to enable full participation in the university community of practice.     

The social experience of early childhood for children with learning disabilities: inclusion,competence and agency

This paper tells of the social experiences of three four‐year‐old children with learning disabilities as they negotiate their daily lives in their homes and early education settings in England. We apply a social model of childhood disability to the relatively unexplored territory of young children and use vignettes drawn from video observation to explore the interactive spaces contained in settings with different cultures of inclusion. Using a multimodal approach to the data we show the nuanced ways in which the children enact their agency. We explore the relationships between agency, culture and structure, and argue that children with learning disabilities are active in making meaning within social and relational networks to which they contribute differently depending on the barriers to doing and being that each network presents. Thus, the paper provides an original use of the notion of distributed competence.     

Young people on the margins: In need of more choices and more chances in twenty‐first century Scotland

The aim of this study was to find out more about the lives of young people in the category ‘not in education, employment or training’ (NEET). We worked intensively with 26 young people in four smaller groups, spending three days with each group. During our time with them we engaged in a variety of creative and artistic activities designed to help them to construct accounts of their lives for us with the purpose of gaining an understanding of what it was like to be NEET. Three significant issues that emerged from these life stories are discussed in this paper. These are the problematic nature of the discourse of NEET sub‐groups; the challenges of school‐exclusion policies and practices; and the myth of low aspirations.     

‘The art of democracy’: Young people's democratic learning in gallery contexts

In this article the authors report on research which aimed to explore the opportunities for democratic action and learning in a number of artist‐led gallery education projects in the south‐west of England. The research takes an approach to citizenship learning and democracy that is less focused on citizenship as a specific subject in the formal school curriculum and the achievement of specific citizenship outcomes that can follow from it. Rather, it is more focused upon understanding how democratic practices that are embedded in the day‐to‐day lives of young people contribute to their democratic learning and participation as citizens. Drawing upon conceptual categories and concepts that illuminate the process, the authors demonstrate the nature and character of young people's democratic learning. An implication arising from this is the need for practice‐orientated research in other contexts (e.g. work, leisure and home) to fully understand the nature of democratic learning.     

Doing student voice work in higher education: An exploration of the value of participatory methods

This paper will review the existing student voice work in higher education and critique its current weaknesses, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of and commitments to participation, transformation and empowerment. It will be argued that the employment of participatory methods in higher education student voice work offers a way to address these weaknesses. The potential of participatory methods is illustrated and discussed using two case examples drawn from one higher education institution in the UK. The first case provides an illustration of what is called ‘transformation of the familiar’, while the second case provides an illustration of empowerment, through recognising the importance of what is not voiced by students, as much as what is voiced. It is concluded that whilst a participatory approach to student voice work in higher education has potential, further work is required in order to evaluate the long‐term impact of projects that use such methods.     

Teacher enquiry as a tool for professional development: Investigating pupils’ effective Talk While Learning

The Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation was a four year project across England exploring the concept of Learning to Learn in 33 primary and secondary schools. The project was funded through the UK based Campaign for Learning. One of the key aims of the project was to ensure that the locus of control in terms of development remains with the schools, who decided on the focus of innovation relevant to them under the umbrella heading of Learning to Learn. A team from the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University then supported and facilitated the teachers in the systematic evaluation of their experiences. As a result we believe that this process supported meaningful professional development about teaching and learning. This paper exemplifies this process through two professional enquiries into pupil talk in the classroom and how it supported learning. The projects were carried out by teachers in two schools, one secondary (11–18 years) and one primary (4–11 years). Both schools decided that encouraging pupil talk about learning best fit with their priorities and the project aims of exploring Learning to Learn. The paper describes the different research methods and findings of the teachers’ research, focusing on the decision making which occurred and how the process of the research has impacted on their professional development. Conclusions are drawn about how the philosophy of Learning to Learn can be as easily applied to the process of professional enquiry through action research and teachers’ learning, as to the more traditional domain of students’ learning and how this might contribute to the development of a successful Learning to Learn school culture.     

Interview Experiences and Diversity Concerns of Counselor Education Faculty From Underrepresented Groups

The authors used transcendental phenomenology to explore the campus interview experiences and diversity concerns of counselor education faculty from underrepresented populations. Six themes were identified: issues of integrity, disappointment in the counseling profession, importance of authenticity, intersectionality of major identity markers, competence, and supportive experiences. Findings suggest that culturally competent search committees should be aware of biases and policies promoting institutional and systemic discrimination.     

Human-aligned artificial intelligence is a multiobjective problem

As the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems improve, it becomes important to constrain their actions to ensure their behaviour remains beneficial to humanity. A variety of ethical, legal and safety-based frameworks have been proposed as a basis for designing these constraints. Despite their variations, these frameworks share the common characteristic that decision-making must consider multiple potentially conflicting factors. We demonstrate that these alignment frameworks can be represented as utility functions, but that the widely used Maximum Expected Utility (MEU) paradigm provides insufficient support for such multiobjective decision-making. We show that a Multiobjective Maximum Expected Utility paradigm based on the combination of vector utilities and non-linear action–selection can overcome many of the issues which limit MEU’s effectiveness in implementing aligned AI. We examine existing approaches to multiobjective AI, and identify how these can contribute to the development of human-aligned intelligent agents.